Kozhikode: Understanding the soil, and reading the minds of the trees around, it has been many years since Raghavan has befriended nature.
For Raghavan from Quilandy in Kozhikode, Kerala, World Environment Day is not a day for planting saplings and celebrating.
On this day, like any other day, he nurtures the trees he had already planted, speaks to others about the need to nurture, and also plants saplings. It has been more than two decades since Quilandy Arikkulathu C Raghavan started telling the world that Environment day is not just to be 'celebrated'.
Be it a wedding or a house warming ceremony or any event to which Raghavan is invited, he reaches the venue with a tree sapling. While handing over his precious gift, he tells the person whom he gifts that the sapling should not just be planted, but nurtured well. Raghavan has already handed over more than 500 saplings that way.
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As the COVID pandemic has tightened its grip in the State, he has stopped distributing saplings for a while now. However, this nature lover says that he would continue to give people tree saplings and keep telling them to nurture the saplings, until his last breath.
Raghavan, who has converted the premises of Naduvannur Government Ayurveda Dispensary into a biodiversity garden, is always ready to make a medicinal plants garden in the premises of schools and other places of work.
After 28 years of service as an Ayurveda pharmacist, Raghavan who retired last year grows saplings on his own and locally procures saplings and gives them for free to those who ask him for saplings.
He has distributed more than a thousand saplings of trees including neem tree, golden shower tree, Indian beech tree, Ashoka tree, Malabar plum or Jamun tree, Rose apple tree, Custard apple tree, Soursop tree, mango tree, gooseberry tree and guava tree.
Raghavan is also at the forefront to give discourses on the importance of medicinal plants and herbs.
